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Indigenous carbon projects generating verified integrated impacts on homelands

Melissa Sinclair APN Cape York | February 2024 Northern Australia Fire Forum

Certainty, Strategy. Capability. Methodology. Credibility. Sustainability.

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Certainty,

Methodology,

Capability.

Sustainable

Credible

Strategy,

Market – Scrutiny - Readiness: Building strong positions

Investable

Communicable

I would like to pay my respect to the Traditional Owners of Darwin, the Traditional Owners of the Southern Wik homelands and Aurukun where APN Cape York works and to the Traditional Owners of the places from which everyone here today is gathered. I acknowledge the important work of Indigenous leaders past, present and emerging.

When talking about carbon co-benefits, it’s easy to focus on monitoring methodologies. However, carbon co-benefits need to be considered more broadly than that.

This presentation is aiming to contribute to the thinking around how Indigenous organisations need to position themselves to achieve great things for their people and Country by developing their market – scrutiny – readiness now. This presentation considers the importance of establishing some critical foundations and capabilities such as certainty, strategy, capability and methodology to ensure credibility and sustainability of carbon plus projects.

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Impact Industry: Local Indigenous values – Global values

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Certainty,

Free and prior informed consent and continuing consent
Intra-Traditional Owner Group Indigenous Land Use Agreements
Articulated and agreed impact domains and other benefit sharing arrangements

Human rights & FPIC: An end in themselves

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Strategy,

Theory of change across all impact domains, climate, social, cultural, gender, economic empowerment, institutional strength, education, climate action and environment increasingly need to be integrated into Strategy with clear monitoring frameworks.
For-purpose Indigenous organisations are now not only carbon credit suppliers, they are also co-investors with government and corporate partners into place-based empowerment.
Strategy and ensuring that the focus is on doing the things that deliver impacts is more important than ever.

Creating Shared Values: Positioning & Impact Focused

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Capability.

Implementation Capability: Integrated and Collective Impact

The challenge of implementing fire management for carbon and other impacts brings challenges of implementation.
Indigenous organisations are challenged to build the right interdisciplinary knowledge teams and programmes that service their community in ways that engage and empower place-based people.
Monitoring, evaluation and impact analysis is a critical component of core business importantly not only for market trust but also to support innovation and improvement to ensure sustainability.

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Methodology,

Methodology: The challenge of managing multiple methods

Monitoring and evaluation methods are increasingly critical for market scrutiny.
The challenge is to ensure your monitoring effort is counting the things that matter to both the markets and to Traditional Owners and their communities.
For for-purpose organisations, there may be real needs to trade off efficiency for other values whilst managing the pursuit of not only impacts in discrete domains but also cumulative impacts across all domains for integrated impact reporting.

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Credibility,

Evidence: Trust and credibility are critical

Greenwashing and blackwashing are now well known.
Global Standards and reporting initiatives are now driving towards greater transparency from corporations.
As markets and Indigenous peoples and their companies are increasingly finding ways to work together, trust is critical for Indigenous organisations between the place-based people and Traditional Owners for whom they work and ensuring their social licence and consent is continuing, as well as trust of their implementation capability and delivery of impacts for both their place and the planet.

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Sustainability.

Sustainability is now a core value for companies for their own viability as well as for nature’s biodiversity and the planetary climate.
Doing things better for people, place and planet is increasingly reportable.
The challenge is now about doing things differently, for-purpose companies may need to focus on intensify place-based impacts programme success rather than scaling and the need to explore how Indigenous organisations and their carbon and co-benefits are supporting the establishment of place-based economies for empowerment of Traditional Owners and local peoples in the long-term is real.

Sustainability: Nature, Planet and Peoples’ Companies